With the visual aid of a very in-depth mindmap entitled "Everything Open and Free", Michel thoroughly touches base on the eight core processes representing the cycle of reproduction and growth of openness inside societies:

1. Aspects of Openness: the demand for open access, spontaneous participation, transparency, full shareability and 'changeability' of the common material. All these represent new social expectations and are key ingredients of the Commons-based peer production.

2. Enablers of Openness: social charters that determine the boundary conditions of the open communities and which define the minimal conditions for openness to be recognized; open code, open licenses, and open standards; as well as the basic conditions which are open access and open data.

3. Infrastructures of Openness: infrastructures in which enablers of openness are embedded. Open platforms, both virtual and physical, to produce in a open way: open collaborative technical platforms, open places where to connect local production with global open design communities, open media and communication infrastructures, open and free software, knowledge and scientific data.

4. Open Practices: all the preceding enablers of openness foster the engagement in open practices, especially open design and open manufacturing, but also free currencies and new forms of sharing (ownership).

5. Open Domains of Practice: embedded in topical domains, such as education and science, where these practices are contextualized and made real to finally result in all kinds of Open Products.

7. Open Movements: new social movements, dedicated to increasing 'openness', tackling the social awareness concerning this shift, strengthening and increasing the numbers of people who see this as a new mode of life and ethical ideal and as their default social practice.

8. Open Consciousness: all the efforts devoted to change subjectivities and how to relate to each other, reinforcing new iterations of the Open Cycle.

Here is the full video interview (with a full text transcription):

P2P and Open Infrastructures: The Rise of Open Society - Michel Bauwens

Duration: 11' 13''

Full English Text Transcription

Michel Bauwens: My name is Michel Bauwens. I am with the P2P Foundation.

3. Infrastructures of Openness

Commons-oriented peer production is basically a combination of an open community, using collaborative platforms and putting knowledge, code and software in a Commons.

The infrastructural element is very important. We need those collaborative platforms.

What I am saying here is that we are creating an infrastructure of cooperation, an infrastructure of openness, in all the different fields of social life.

Here is the list again:

Open collaboration spaces - think about The Hub, which is a place where global entrepreneurs can work together - this is an infrastructure that reflects different values.

Open meeting infrastructures - like BarCamps and Unconferences - these are ways of bringing people together to share knowledge and achieve some change, which has completely different rules from classic conference, where you have to listen to people speak.

Open funding infrastructures - where every individual has the freedom to collaborate in creating a fund, Crowd funding, social lending, etc.

This is the third step.

We had aspects of openness, new value systems, which were embedded in social charters.

Now we have achieved a third step.

We are creating new infrastructures of openness and collaboration, which are based on these new values, which have these these charters embedded in the way they are conceived.

This brings us to a fourth aspect.

4. Practices of Openness

I am just showing now examples of the open infrastructures.

What you see passing on the screen is, basically, the shift from open software to open hardware.

In other words, we have gone from open knowledge to open software and now we move to

We take all these open platforms, open practices, open products and we create a platform where people can exchange these concrete experiences and learn from each other.

We arrive at the end of our circle, which is basically open consciousness.

8. Open Consciousness

We had the starting point which was the transvaluation, a new value system, which is an expression of a new form of consciousness.

We have arrived at this expression of open consciousness.

I want to use an analogy to explain why I took this approach.

Let's say we live in a feudal society.

In a feudal society, the lord gets the surplus from his farmers. He has, really, no interest in accumulating capital, but he spends it in a kind of competition with all the lords - but if you live in the city of Florence or Venice and you are a merchant, this does not really work.

At some point, a monk invents double bookkeeping, but once people start using double bookkeeping, they start thinking differently about value and managing value.

The fact that they use these tools, in turn, changes consciousness.

And a new society will basically be born because, in different fields, people are inventing new patterns.

These patterns kind of align to each other and, eventually, will create a new logic within society that emerges first, then might become as strong as the old system and eventually takes it over.

That is the story.

Conclusion

What I want to say is that we cannot change society merely by doing politics if we do not also have a proof that our alternatives work.

It is important to combine constructive and inter-networked construction of open infrastructures. This is how we change our concrete lives.

Even within the old system, we can change our lives.

Then we interconnect with each other and we create a baseline of change within society.

This, in itself, is not enough to change society, but it is a condition.

We combine that with social movements who have the power to change politics and to change the institutions in society.

Finally, we deal with policymaking and creating new institutions that will embed all of these changes.

I think open infrastructures are a very important step and it is very important to understand them.

The final point I want to make is: An enormous amount of people are doing this, but they may not know that other people are doing it, so they feel isolated and maybe they do not really believe in the change they want.

I think, by showing this map, we are showing that the open alternative, far from just being something totally marginal, has, already a substantial reality.

I invite you to check it out and to look at your own field of activity, whether it is spirituality or business or politics, and find out what other people are doing to change their lives, to create new social structures and to connect with them and to form a social movement that can change the world.

Michel Bauwens (1958) is a Belgian integral philosopher and peer-to-peer theorist. He has worked as an internet consultant, information analyst for the United States Information Agency, information manager for British Petroleum (where he created one of the first virtual information centers), and is former editor-in-chief of the first European digital convergence magazine, the Dutch language Wave.